The idea of change scares a lot of people! The thought of being uncomfortable in a new environment freaks us out and results in us being unable to adapt. Like IQ and EQ, we need to understand the Adaptability Quotient, or AQ, to succeed in our life. Be it a new relationship, a new role in life or a new workplace, we all need to adapt. If Charles Darwin was with us today, he would have said it’s “survival of the most adaptable“. In this session we will explore what AQ is and how it’s tied to our personal mental model. Our shared activities will help you learn how to identify your mental model and make it more adaptable.

Around the world there is a global network of people who, with little fanfare and deep dedication, incubate ideas that change our world.

They are the ‘agilists’ — those who adhere to the Agile Manifesto published in 2001. They meet in small and big rooms, around tables and on stages. They help each other to make good ideas great.

If you want to be part of the agile community, this session will open the door to this global movement. With candour and generosity, the speaker invites you to join and shows you how. He reveals why you’ll love it. And he illuminates the path he took to becoming a leader in the global agile community.

You can join the agile community, too. If you are willing, you are welcome.

In this session, you’ll discover how to:

• benefit from being part of the agile community
• plan and win a speaking gig
• lead an in-house agile community of practice
• be seen as a leader within your corporation and your community

When agilists get together, they change the world. You can be part of that change.

Tired of struggling to get approval and buy-in for agile improvement ideas you know are good? Action forms are the answer. Turn every "no" into a "sure, why not?" Using the Cynefin action form will gets your idea across the line.

In this hands-on session we'll use the action form and design safe-to-fail experiments that leaders and teams will feel fine about trying. You'll wonder how you ever got permission to try anything without it.

I will tell you some of the secrets you need to know to become a great ScrumMaster. Create a high-performing collaborative environment at your organization, which makes your organization more than competitive in the current complex globalized world.

This session is targeted to all leaders of Agile transformation, Agile Coaches, and ScrumMasters who understand the Agile basics but have the dream of achieving significantly better results with Agile/Scrum.

The session is based on my book The Great ScrumMaster, published by Addison-Wesley, Signature Series (Cohn) on Jan 2017.  The Great ScrumMaster - #ScrumMasterWay.

The pandemic taught us many things – about our professions, our teams, ourselves... But it also exposed gaps in our workplace repertoire – not all of us were well-equipped for a virtual workforce and the unexpected challenges that came from losing in-person interactions. Conflict has taken on a new identity that requires a more rigorous understanding of virtual behavior and workplace empathy. In this session, we will take a deep dive into virtual conflict and discover facilitation techniques that empower empathetic mediation and steer conversations toward healthy resolution.

We’ve all been there… having to sit through painful meetings and workshops that leads to more confusion, lack of clarity and frustration with a poor use of everyone’s time.

But, we’ve also been to those sessions that have been well facilitated where you think and say, “wow, I can’t believe the day has gone by so fast” and “that was a fantastic session, it really helped..!”

I want to help people and organisations have more of the latter by sharing my principles and practical tips on how to improve yourself to becoming a master facilitator – this is based on taking a human-centred approach by valuing every individual, including yourself. I’ll be using my “facilitation tree” to help everyone visualise what’s needed to always produce fruitful outcomes where value is created and people are valued.

How can executive management build customer-driven product teams?

Agile product development practices provide a pathway to realize the co-creation of desired product outcomes between customers and development teams. Quickly and frequently obtaining feedback on real products directly from customers give them a direct voice into their own value stream. However, orienting your teams and leadership to build and react to quick feedback iteratively is a significant challenge to any organization taking this on. This presentation will provide an overview of core fundamental techniques that bring customers and teams together. 

Having good metrics to guide change is important, whether it is an Agile transformation or any kind of change within your organisation. Who is it that should decide which metrics are important? Enduring change is co-created by leaders at all levels in an organisation, and unless the vision and metrics are also co-created, the efficacy and sustainability of the change can be undermined.

This talk will offer insights around the importance of collectively understanding why something is being measured in the context of transformational change, and also the importance of creating a change community that aligns around the metrics for that change – making the change more evolutionary in nature rather than prescribed. Having a vision and metrics that are built by the change community generates greater momentum and allows the change community and leaders at all levels to leverage collective intelligence on which metrics are important to guide the change.

In this session you will learn about:

• What a change community is, why you should have one, and steps you can take to start one
• The importance of a change vision and aligning on it to enable co-creation of change metrics, as well as some useful techniques to co-create one
• Some steps, techniques and tools that you can use to co-create metrics that will guide you towards the change vision and allow your community to collectively sense and respond
• The feedback loops that ensure your change metrics keep working for you
• Ways that you can start to practice this in your organisation

This session aligns with your 'Practices' track the most. It also relates to the 'Culture and Leadership' and 'Agile Everywhere' tracks.

When it comes to Agility, finance is late to the party and often seen as the enemy. After all, finance is all about numbers and rules, while agile and business agility is all about flexibility and adaptability.

However, if agility is supposed to deliver better customer outcomes, greater ROI and improved value, then shouldn't finance be expected to be leading from the front. Why is this not the case?

I sought answers to this question by speaking with many of our customers' finance departments. What I found was that there is a lack of understanding of what financial agility entails, how it can benefit both the department and the company and importantly, why it is that Agility practitioners and finance teams need to work together more closely in order to bridge this gap to realise the full potential of agility within an enterprise.

Do you think an executive playing the Product Owner role, remote self-designing team workshops and a multi-team Product Backlog Refinement session is fictional? Do you think that LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) is non-existent in Australia? Think again. It is currently happening locally in a 3,000 person financial services organisation.

You are invited to a candid "fireside chat" with Findex Digital Scrum Master Sam Peacock and independent consultant Rowan Bunning. This is an interactive session during which you can submit and upvote questions for Sam and Rowan to respond to.

Moderator Alistair Thomas will start with some questions aimed to clarify:

• how to get leaders to saying “let’s go” on a radical change in an informed way,
• the advantages of feature teams over component teams,
• the advantages of a broad product definition and whole product focus,
• how a single Product Owner can work with several teams without becoming a bottleneck,
• a more agile alternative to analysts gathering and handing off requirements and
• how Sprint-to-Sprint agility can be sustained and leveraged with many teams.

Come prepared with curiosity. The insights you gain may help you to navigate how your organisation can optimise for product agility and highest customer value at multi-team scale by leveraging good Scrum.

Agile coaching is not easy and if you're a coach, you'll hopefully know this already. And if you've ever been coached before, you might recognise some of the habits that are explored in this interactive workshop.

In our experience, there are some coaching habits that do not reflect true coaching. There are coaching habits that are detrimental to the person being coached.

As agile coaching becomes more and more popular, there is a tendency for 'coaches' to jump on the bandwagon without the understanding of what a coach truly is. 

This is not a lecture on what coaching is. We intend to explore the topic in this workshop through interactive activities to help you feel and reflect on what coaching is and is not.

Have you ever struggled with creating alignment between the members of a team? What does our approach of coaching individuals leave on the table? What if we focus on interaction between the individuals instead of the individuals themselves? In this workshop, we will demonstrate coaching the interactions between the individuals to create alignment. We will use LandsWork, a group coaching activity from Organisational and Relationship System Coaching, to simulate the coaching technique - a must-have for all coaches.

Does your product owner write all the stories? Does your team complain that stories lack detail? Are you finding it difficult to move things to done? Is your done work leaving lots of gaps your customers might find? Do you struggle to break down work into small deliverable slices? Example Mapping can help!

Example Mapping is a process designed by Matt Wynne ( https://cucumber.io/blog/bdd/example-mapping-introduction/ ) and is a great way to elaborate your features in a collaborative way. Bring together your business people, developers and even your customers to build out detailed stories, acceptance criteria and examples you can run as tests. It is collaborative because everyone can work on their area of knowledge simultaneously. There is no pre-defined order so you can work with the knowledge you have rather than the knowledge you wish you had. It's detailed enough to flush out edge conditions and error states. It's high level enough to engage with customers and business stakeholders. It's fast enough to get outcomes even if your team is time poor. 

I've been using Example Mapping as a very quick and effective way to start with a rough outline of the goals I want the team to achieve and come out with a detailed backlog of Stories and key Acceptance Tests. I've been using this over 5 years now both in-person and online. I love how easy it is to engage people at the level their comfortable with. We can walk through example by example or we can start by outlining high level outcomes.

In this workshop we will learn about Example Mapping, how to apply it to your backlog to create some great stories the team can execute. We will practice applying it together to see how we can turn a few simple ideas into a detailed plan.

Ever had that problem where leaders in your organisation have different views on what dynamics create great agile teams?

We often talk about the transformational leadership skills required to enable agile transformations, but what about the frontline agile leaders leading teams and shipping products?
As Agile becomes commonplace, a new breed of leaders is required that embrace the modern 21st Century leadership practices that sit behind great Agile teams.

This talk pulls together a range of key leadership models and concepts from traditional leadership models, lean Toyota practices and Management 3.0 to provide a set of practical tools and techniques to help you create frontline leaders that can help you build that leader-leader environment you thirst for.

This talk is about how I, as a Product Owner, can supercharge any scrum team by providing them with purpose. I'll talk about the tools and techniques I've learnt through experience and how you can use them to boost your teams performance.

As a product consultant I've had the privilege to work with over 50+ companies. Through my work I've observed teams at all levels and learnt the traits that separate the good from the best.

A strong culture enables the team to perform. Creating a culture of enablement means playing as a team. With transparency, trust and purpose. I'll talk about how to create a strong culture within the team with these these points:

* Vision & Purpose: Understanding not just where to play but how to win, is critical. 
* Trust & Psychological Safety: Nobody should fear getting involved, having a voice or an opinion and expressing disagreement.
* Accountability: In order to perform as a single cohesive unit, individuals must be diligent and disciplined in the role they play and its responsibilities.
* Co-creation: There are many ways to solve a problem, the best way is together.
* Celebrations: A motivated scrum team and the value of reward and recognition.

I'll be talking about the importance of storytelling, problem framing, crafting a compelling vision and prioritising techniques that take into account both business and customer value.

With this talk you'll learn 5 key ways to supercharge any scrum team through purpose:

1. Create alignment through vision and strategy.
2. Ensure a culture of psychological safety. Trust to empower teams.
3. Co-create and build together as one team.
4. Drive accountability and diligence in work.
5. Celebrate outputs and outcomes.

An interactive exploration of my top tips, strategums, flim flams, agile hacks and otherwise for enabling continuous improvement. Choose your own adventure and influence which direction the session goes in. This session could be delivered 50 times and each time would be different.

Scrum has come to Canberra and along with it Product Owners. It has been growing for a few years but now just about every Federal Government Agency have Product Owners running around. However, they are still facing the classic issue of how do you empower a Product Owner in such a hierarchical and inflexible organisation?

We’ve all seen it, the Product Owner who can’t make a decision without a committee or approval from above. Let’s break the pattern! Or should I say anti-pattern.

In this session you will learn about:

• How a Product Owner differs in Government
• What anti-pattern indicators are out there for Product Owners
• How as a Product Owner you can break free of these disempowering anti-patterns
• How to enable Product Owners in your team

We all have read the definition of the Scrum master role in the Scrum guide. However different organisations implement the role differently. Few companies have a "pure" Scrum master position. Others implement it as a "hatted" or "mixed" role, where the responsibilities are added to people who already have other duties and creating position titled as "Agile BA/SM".

While there is no right or wrong answer, we will look at a few different definitions, also looking at a few job advertisements - and then have a group activity discussing what the participants about how think the Scrum master could serve more effectively their organsation in their particular context.

Maybe in their context Scrum masters both coach agile values to their team(s) and are also responsible for delivery. Maybe they think that the SM should be both a BA and a SM - what would be the trade-offs then? Can a Scrum Master help the organisation with capability improvement (beyond their assigned team)? While there is no silver bullet to solve these issues, we will think together how we can answer these questions and what are the risks we should be aware of. 

In this workshop we will share a role-based simulation of DevOps culture using the scrum framework. This is a large scale activity that will include all attendees split into 2 to 4 scrum teams and will have team members adopt common scrum and operational team personas in a fun and interactive game.

Credit must be given first and foremost to the originator of this game Dana Pylayeva, this is a culture simulation that can be shared with any scrum team!

The outcomes for the players will include an understanding of DevOps, its roles and their inter-dependencies, the acquisition of T-Shaped skills, and the scrum teams journey of operational inclusion.

Oh and did I mention you get to play with Lego and eat Chocolate?

We all dream of that utopian sprint goal. You know the one that is focussed on customer impact, shippable at the end of the increment, and created collaboratively with the team?

In this workshop, I'll share with you my approach to collaboratively crafting killer sprint goals with your teams, and provide you with my canvas to facilitate it.

No matter where your team is on the maturity scale, this workshop will show you how to continuously improve your sprint goals, keep your team focussed on the customer, and measure that improvement over time.